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Unraveling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations
The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.
"Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the droughts associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe," said Katherine Power, a doctoral student in the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University and the study's first author.
Collapse amid a drying climate
Around 3,200 years ago, many of the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Mycenaeans, Minoans and Hittite Empire, experienced widespread societal collapse. Although severe droughts have long been linked to this period, the climatic processes behind these events remain uncertain.
To investigate this, Power and Qiong Zhang, a professor of paleoclimate modeling in the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University and a co-author of the study, used a state-of-the-art climate model to reconstruct the evolution of the Mediterranean climate over the past 8,000 years.
"Our results show that the region underwent a gradual drying trend over thousands of years, driven by slow changes in Earth's orbit. Superimposed on this long-term trend, we also found shorter-term fluctuations in the Atlantic Ocean and atmosphere," Power said.
When climate cycles aligned
The researchers found that the most severe droughts occurred when several natural climate cycles aligned, temporarily reinforcing one another and producing droughts far more intense than the long-term drying trend alone.
"The convergence of these processes pushed the Eastern Mediterranean beyond a critical hydroclimatic threshold, reducing water availability and increasing pressure on agriculture and food security within already vulnerable societies," Power said.
Signals for future drought risk
These findings change how researchers think about past droughts, and understanding these processes is highly relevant today:
"The Mediterranean is one of the world's climate change hotspots, and the region is projected to become warmer and drier during the coming century. Our findings suggest that future drought risk may depend not only on long-term human-driven warming but also on how natural variability in the Atlantic Ocean interacts with that background trend," Power said.
By revealing how different climate processes combine to amplify drought, this research can provide new insights into the risks of future hydroclimatic extremes in a warming world, the researchers said.
For this research, the model EC-Earth was used.
Publication details
Katherine Power, Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed5439. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed5439
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Citation: Unraveling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations (2026, July 24) retrieved 24 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-unraveling-climate-collapse-bronze-age.html
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